Coach’s ‘Unhealthy’ Obsession Has Led to Success at Texas A&M

COLLEGE STATION, Tex., March 19 — Texas A&M Coach Billy Gillispie drinks Dr Pepper for breakfast, does not know his sister’s last name and is so tough on his players that his mother swears that she would never play for him.

Gillispie, 47, is the only coach of the 16 teams remaining in the N.C.A.A. tournament who is not married, and some of his friends and family say that with his obsessive work habits, that most likely will not change. Gillispie openly refers to his life as “unbalanced,” and his friends call his obsession with basketball “unhealthy.”

In a profession full of quirky workaholics, Gillispie is known as one of the most eccentric. Few have taken a more rigorous road to the top of the college coaching profession. Gillispie started as a team manager at Sam Houston State and taught history and geography for eight years while working as a high school assistant and head coach. Along the way to A&M, he switched jobs 10 times in 19 years, divorced and became one of the most beloved and respected coaches in Texas.

“A lot of people talk about ‘I’m married to my work’; it’s a cliché,” the Texas A&M assistant Alvin Brooks said. “Well, this dude is truly married to his work. The coaches and the players, we’re his family.”

Gillispie’s third-seeded Aggies (27-6) are in the Round of 16 for the first time in 27 years and are poised to have two virtual home games, three hours from their campus, to reach the Final Four. They play No. 2 seed Memphis (32-3) on Thursday night in the South Region in San Antonio, and the winner of that game plays the winner of No. 1 Ohio State (32-3) and No. 5 Tennessee (24-10).

Texas A&M was long considered a basketball coaching graveyard, a university where more students showed up for yell practice the night before football games than at basketball games. But Gillispie’s commitment to defense, his boundless work ethic and his homespun Texas connections have revived the program from winless in the Big 12 the year before he arrived to a long weekend away from the Final Four.

“His success he’s having right now isn’t a one-time deal,” said the Hall of Fame Coach Don Haskins, who talks to Gillispie every day. “This isn’t luck; this is hard work. I don’t know when the man sleeps.”

Gillespie’s road to becoming a basketball miracle worker began in Graford, Tex., a town of 578 people in the central part of the state, where Gillispie grew up as the only boy among five children. Graford is too small to even have six-man football, so the town channels its Friday Night Lights-caliber passion to the hardwood. Gillispie says that when he talks to the Graford High School coach today, he will ask about the team and end up getting a scouting report about a bumper crop of fourth graders.

Gillispie’s father, Clyde, drove a cattle truck. Wimpy Gillispie, his 74-year-old mother, still works as a check-out clerk at Morrow Grocery, where she brags about the meats and the feed.

It did not take long for the youngster known as Billy Clyde to show the traits that define him today — hard work and a fierce competitive streak. He started working in a pool hall racking balls and sweeping floors at age 7.

“His work ethic is deep within his soul,” said Misty Meyer, Gillispie’s ex-wife, who has since remarried.

His mother said he saved his money from his early jobs to put a recliner on layaway and gave it to his father for Christmas. Whether it was a spelling bee, show animals or a school contest to see who could sell the most raffle tickets, Gillispie always tried to win. His father wanted him to be a cowboy, but he chose high tops over boots.

“When he was in junior high, everyone knew who was coming down the street because they could hear the ball bouncing first,” Wimpy Gillispie said in a telephone interview.

Gillispie played point guard for Graford and then went to Ranger College, a junior college in Texas, where his lack of ability on the court led him to coaching.

Photo

Billy Gillispie has led third-seeded Texas A&M (27-6) to the Round of 16 for the first time in 27 years.Credit
Paul Zoeller/Associated Press

“I figured as bad a player I was, I needed to become a coach in a big hurry,” he said in his self-deprecating manner.

Not being from a blueblood basketball background, Gillispie used the only coaching contact he had. Clyde Gillispie went to high school with Bob Derryberry, who was the coach at Sam Houston State.

“Clyde is a character and he said, ‘My son, Billy Clyde, is coming down to Sam Houston to help you,’ ” Derryberry said in a telephone interview this week. “I said, ‘O.K., send him down here.’ ”

Gillispie worked as a manager for Derryberry and then as a graduate assistant for him at Texas State for three years. In a health class there he met Misty, a cheerleader, whom he married in 1985, and soon started his career as an assistant coach and history teacher at Killeen High School.

“I can always remember him being totally interested in going to the Final Four,” said Misty, who will be at Thursday’s game and watches all the Aggie games on television. “It was a dream he’s always had.”

That was the first of four high school stops for Gillispie, who coached and taught for eight years at the high school level. He admits that his passion for coaching was greater than his passion for teaching.

“I think I did a good job of teaching, but I could have done a better job of teaching the subject,” he said. “I had to study harder than they did. A lot of it was because of my limited knowledge of the subject and my lack of intelligence. That’s the truth.”

Gillispie also said that he poured more energy into basketball, and over the next eight seasons as a high school coach he helped build the relationships that have helped him become an icon of coaches in Texas.

“In the state of Texas, if Billy doesn’t know you, he knows your aunt, uncle and cousin and the truck driver that lives in your neighborhood,” said St. John’s Coach Norm Roberts, who worked with Gillispie at Illinois. “Everyone in Texas knows Billy Clyde.”

Jerry Hoffman, Gillispie’s sister, who coaches girls’ basketball at Crockett High School in East Texas, said, “One of the things I admire about him most is all those high school coaches still feel like he’s one of them.”

When Gillispie left high school coaching for a job as an assistant at a junior college, South Plains in Levelland, in 1993, he also divorced after eight years of marriage. Gillispie attributed the breakup to several factors, but said the primary problem was his “laziness toward working hard enough at a relationship.”

Meyer, who declined to get into specifics on their marriage, said, “I think he’s a bit too self-deprecating in regards to that.”

After Gillispie worked one year at South Plains, he was hired at Baylor. That led to Bill Self hiring him at Tulsa in 1997 and then at Illinois, where Gillispie’s work ethic helped separate him. At Illinois, Roberts remembers Gillispie having 50 or 60 handwritten recruiting letters stacked behind his desk every day. He would stay up all night writing scores of letters, but then just mail out a few each day. “And they were all different,” Roberts said. “He just didn’t write the same thing.”

Gillispie brought the same passion to the court. The former Illinois player Jerrance Howard remembers Gillispie’s individual workouts being so grueling that the players were happy that Self promoted Gillispie so that he would be on the road recruiting.

“You knew he was special then,” Howard said. “He just had a certain swagger.”

Gillispie took that swagger to Texas-El Paso in 2002, going 6-24 in his first season as head coach. Mack Rhoades, who was an associate athletic director at UTEP at the time, said that despite the bad record, he frequently got calls saying how much people enjoyed watching the team because of how hard they played. The next season the Miners went 24-8 and reached the N.C.A.A. tournament. Gillispie then left for A&M, where he has made progress in each of his three seasons, including an upset of No. 5 seed Syracuse in the N.C.A.A. tournament last season.

Gillispie said he feels more adjusted in College Station than he did in El Paso, where his life was so unbalanced that his house was barely furnished. When he held a Selection Sunday gathering in March at his house in El Paso, the Christmas tree was still up. Still, he knows he spends more nights dissecting film than hanging out with friends.

“I probably neglect myself socially,” Gillispie said. “But I’m the happiest guy in the world. What my being requires for happiness is totally different. I understand, I’m a different person. I know it’s not as healthy as it should be.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Unhealthy’ Obsession Has Led to Success. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe